Account of a Tour in Normandy, Volume 2 eBook

The town was then taken through the treachery of a
priest of the name of Jean de la Tour, who received,
as a recompence, a stall in the cathedral at Evreux,
but was so much an object of abhorrence with his brethren,
that he scarcely ever ventured to appear in his place.
During the holy week, however, he attended; and it
once happened, that while he was so officiating, all
the canons contrived to leave the church towards the
close of the psalm, which immediately precedes the
Benedictus at Laudes, so that the anthem,
Traditor autem, which is sung with that hymn,
necessarily fell to the part of de la Tour, who found
himself compelled to chaunt it, to his own extreme
confusion, and the infinite amusement of the congregation.
Irritated and mortified, the poor priest preferred
his complaints to the king; but it was one thing to
love the treason, and another to love the traitor;
and his appeal obtained no redress.

From Louviers our next stage was Gaillon, on our road
to which we passed some vineyards, the most northern,
I believe, in Normandy. The vines cultivated
in them are all of the small black cluster grape; and
the wine they produce, I am told, is of very inferior
quality,—­No place can appear at present
more poverty-stricken than Gaillon; but the case was
far otherwise before the glories of royal and ecclesiastical
France were shorn by the revolution. Ducarel,
who visited this town about the year 1760, dwells
with great pleasure upon the magnificence of its palace
and its Carthusian convent and church. Of the
palace the remains are still considerable; and, after
having been suffered to lie in a state of ruin and
neglect from an early period in the revolution, they
are now fitting up as a prison. The long inscription
formerly over the gate might with great propriety
be replaced by the hacknied phrase, “Sic transit
gloria mundi;” for the vicissitudes of the fortune
of noble buildings are strikingly illustrated by the
changes experienced by this sumptuous edifice, long
proverbial throughput France for its splendor.

Philip Augustus conferred the lordship of Gaillon
upon one of his captains of the name of Cadoc, as
a reward for his activity in the conquest of Normandy.
Louis IXth afterwards, early in the thirteenth century,
ceded the town in perpetuity to the Archbishop of Rouen.
St. Louis here received by way of exchange the Chateau
of Pinterville, which he bestowed upon William d’Aubergenville,
whose uncle, the Bishop of Evreux, had, while chancellor
of France, done much service to him and to Queen Blanche,
his mother. From that time to the revolution the
archbishops had their country seat at Gaillon, and
enjoyed the sole right of trying civil and criminal
causes within the town and its liberties. Their
palace, which was destroyed during the wars of Henry
Vth, in 1423, was rebuilt about a century afterwards
by the munificence of the first cardinal Georges d’Amboise,
one of whose successors in the prelacy, Colbert, expended,